Boredom is inevitable, suffering optional

I was a little disappointed this weekend as Haruki Murakami was in the Guardian's Weekend magazine with extracts of his book on running- I was very excited about this (and being able to read the Saturday papers at all- this is becoming a new luxury for me on my weekends off from Sadie) as as he is my favourite writer and I love, well rather quite like, running, so I skipped to and from the newsagents on Saturday, poured myself a cup of herbal and tucked into his words, expecting to be blown away. Thing is- I got bored halfway through and had to stop reading it. I kept going back over it in case I had missed the point but no- I was glazing over. There is only so much someone can say about running and I think he said too much. I shall not be buying this book, but I still love him as a novelist despite his ramblings about marathons and pain. He is clearly obsessed (he is currently in training for his 24th marathon) and a lot of what he said about how it feels to run makes sense to me and I can relate to it, but enough already! Running is hard work but it makes you feel good. That is all you need to know.
I went for my first run in a while last night on the seafront in the early evening sun. Again- this is all you need to know. The shoreline was packed with people, even right up into Hove which is usually the quiet end for revellers. I think I was the only person who was actually stupid enough to be moving this fast in the heat- I didn't spot another jogger at all, and there are ordinarily quite a few of us virtuously panting our way along the prom. I still can't quite believe that I managed to pull a bloke on one of these jogging outings. I looked like a cherry tomato on a stick when I got home last night. Maybe running is the new cruising. Maybe not. And if it was you would think in all his endless musings, Murakami might have mentioned this.
He sums up his relationship to running in the last paragraph of the Weekend article;
'I may not hear the Rocky theme song, or see the sunset anywhere, but for me, this may be a sort of conclusion. An understated, rainy-day-sneakers sort of conclusion. An anticlimax, if you will. Turn it into a screenplay, and the Hollywood producer would just glance at the last page and toss it back. But the long and the short of it is that this kind of conclusion fits who I am. What I mean is, I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run. Simply because I wanted to.'

Well- go and run then and write another novel please!

Soundtrack: Nancy Sinatra- Sugartown